U.S. tech industry welcomes Senate immigration bill

Reuters

By Alina Selyukh

WASHINGTON, April 16 (Reuters) - Tech industry officialswelcomed a bipartisan U.S. Senate immigration bill on Tuesday,saying they hoped it would make it easier to hire highly skilledworkers from abroad.

The bipartisan "Gang of Eight" group of senators releasedhighlights of the bill, backed by President Barack Obama, thatseeks to reform the immigration system and nearly doubles thequota for H-1B visas for skilled workers.

For months, the tech sector has ratcheted up pressure on theU.S. Congress to make highly skilled immigration rules moreflexible, arguing that there are not enough highly skilledAmerican workers to fill its growing number of specialty jobopenings.

"This really does a lot to address our concerns about beingable to hire workers when we need them," Intel Corp policy director Peter Muller said in an interview on Tuesday."We're certainly going to be looking into details of this goingforward ... but in terms of the big picture, we're veryencouraged and pleased."

The bill did not propose raising the number of H-1B visas ashigh as 300,000, as big tech companies had sought in the past,but it would allow the cap to rise to as high as 180,000 infuture years, and sets aside 25,000 such visas for graduateswith degrees in science, technology, engineering and math.

Most companies and tech groups, including the new groupFWD.us formed by Facebook Inc's Mark Zuckerberg to lobbyon the issue, withheld comment awaiting a review of the fulltext of the bill.

"We're very encouraged that they produced a bill and we seea lot of positives, but we do have some concerns we hope to seeworked out," said Dan Turrentine, vice president for governmentrelations at TechNet, a group representing such companies asGoogle Inc, Cisco Systems Inc, Apple Inc and Yahoo! Inc.

Tech companies will be watching several provisions in thebill that risk becoming hindrances to prompt hiring, includingnew requirements to pay H-1B visa holders higher wages and torecruit American workers prior to hiring foreigners.

Both provisions seek to address the concerns of manyworkers' groups that oppose raising the number of H-1B visas,saying companies use the visas as a way to hire cheaper workerswho lack job mobility.

"We appreciate that the Senate Gang recognizes that seriousproblems with the H-1B program can be resolved by more STEMgreen cards, delivered faster," said Marc Apter, president ofIEEE-USA, which represents U.S. engineering, computing andtechnology workers, in a statement.

The bill is seen as having much more impact on smaller techfirms, particularly so-called "H-1B-dependent" outsourcingcompanies, than large corporations because it mandates use ofthe "E-Verify" system, designed to verify legal status, andminimum salary requirements.

Most large companies already run new hires through"E-Verify" and pay foreigners and Americans comparable salaries.

"We think it's very reasonable to add additionalrequirements to the users of the H-1B visa, but those also haveto be workable requirements, so that's something we're going topay close attention to," said Intel's Muller.

"But we know it's going to be a long process ... and as astarting point, we're really encouraged."